Justine Carrion-Weiss

I am an Innovation Strategist undertaking my doctoral study in Design Innovation, where I research how organisations recognise the effectiveness of rapid design-led interventions and how they measure this effectiveness, if at all.

The topic of my research emerged during the two years I spent working closely with SME owners and sole traders as part of my Innovator-in-Residence role at Northumbria, where I co-designed and delivered rapid and intense design-led interventions to support organisations with innovation. These interventions were part of Get Ready To Innovate (GRTI), a programme delivered in the UK through Creative Fuse North East (2017-2019; 2020-on-going) and in Armenia through the British Council Creative Spark project in partnership with the American University of Armenia (2018-2019).

As part of my doctoral research, I am working with Cornell University (US) to deliver GRTI in the United States as the first phase of EGK Starters, a programme funded by the IIE Centennial Fellowship (2020-2021). The ambition of this programme is to close the opportunity gap between BIPOC*-led startups and VC investments amid the COVID-19 crisis in Birmingham, Alabama.

I am also the co-founder and director of an Innovation Design consultancy, Nuhj (which is the phonetic spelling of the word ‘nudge’), and is an Associate Lecturer in Design at Northumbria University. I graduated from Northumbria with a Master in Multidisciplinary Innovation in 2016 and from the University of Burgundy, Dijon, France, with a BA in Modern Foreign Languages Applied to Business & Communications in 2015.

*BIPOC: black, indigenous, and people of colour